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Freshwater Beach 28-Aug-2011 At 11:25:10 AM sbm

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Again, a bit pathetic compared to all the lucky people in Africa and the Karakoram, but the Sydney sea cliffs are always a little exiting.

Not quite sure how a "relaxing saturday morning of easy climbing" turned into "let's go to this obscure Sydney sea cliff with two recorded routes and try and climb something" but it did.

Freshwater is a pretty nice beach. The surf was 2 foot and offshore and the sun came out just as we reached the foot of the headland.

To get to the top of the cliff, first you scramble up to a big halfway ledge from the beach. There's the ruins of an old house there, complete with rusty plumbing everywhere and a tiled floor. After walking over the foundations of this old house you come to a concrete platform that must have been the balcony. It doubles as a fantastic belay ledge, and it's been liberally furnished with a couch, graffiti and plenty of broken glass by the locals.

The prospects for leading were a bit suicidal, so we decided toproping was in. We did another tricky scramble up a short corner to get to an overgrown path and old steps that led to the top. Once the path starts running along the cliff top, it's a matter of guessing where the top of your line is, tying off a couple of trees, and forcing and post-holing your way through five meters of extremely thick vegetation to throw down the toprope ("next time we're bringing a machete").

Once back on the old balcony, you climb down to another vegetated ledge that is the starting point for one of the recorded climbs 'Gawkers'. It's covered in broken furniture, trash, and more broken glass. Stay classy, Manly.

Once I actually start climbing though I started having fun. We toproped the wall to the right of 'Gawkers', and James finally spotted the rusty carrots on it after something like four trips to the crag, which must be some kind of record.

The next climb we did was the arete between 'Gawkers' and 'Damocles'. We started right from the bottom at beach level, and getting off the ground was fun. After trying to grovel through a waterfall of greenery on the right, I went way left and managed to do a big reach over a blank section of rock and mantle onto a sandy ledge. Then I traversed out to the overhanging base of the arete and climbed it to the next ledge, before finishing up the layback crack and headwall of 'Damocles'.

It was great and varied climbing, but with an unbelievable amount of dirt and sand. When I was walking around trying to find a start, the toprope was brushing off massive clumps of dirt and dead leaves, covering everything like snow, until we just had to laugh. Good times.

James scrambled unroped around way to the right and traversed in from the start ledge of 'Gawkers', then tied in at the base of the arete. He broke off one big horn, but stayed on, and made it all the way until the last headwall until breaking off another big hold, and came off that time.

So in between screwing around we got a couple of fun topropes in in a fantastic location. Good training for North Head. And if anyone wants to lead the arete, there were a couple of terrible thread runners that didn't break off immediately...

We had the gopro so here's a pretty video.

Freshwater Beach Climbing from Sam May on Vimeo.